Tips from the Windows Pros: Pivoting Your Display

Finally, here's an option you may have been thinking of based on ads you see in computer magazines: pivoting your display. Actually, the Radius monitor for the Macintosh introduced the idea quite a few years ago; now the portrait display is coming around again, this time in the form of a flat panel. A number of LCD monitor makers have introduced pivoting units and the accompanying software that turns the image and negotiates among the mouse driver, the screen driver, and Windows so that the geometry works out right.

Both my co-author and I have been bitten by the LCD bug and have pivoting monitors. Considering that most writing and Web sites are designed to be printed or viewed in the portrait dimension, a portrait monitor makes a tremendous amount of sense. Unlike older CRT models, these modern LCD monitors can be easily pivoted. A click of the software, and the screen image rotates 90 degrees.